Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing

By Stacey Waite

Teaching Queer looks closely at student writing, transcripts of class discussions, and teaching practices in first-year writing courses to articulate queer theories of literacy and writing instruction, while also considering the embodied actuality of being a queer teacher. Rather than positioning queerness as connected only to queer texts or queer teachers/students (as much work on queer pedagogy has done since the 1990s), the book offers writing and teaching as already queer practices, and contends that the overlap between queer theory and composition presents new possibilities for teaching writing. Teaching Queer argues for and enacts "queer forms"—non-normative and category-resistant forms of writing—those that move between the critical and the creative, the theoretical and the practical, and the queer and the often invisible normative functions of classrooms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Jul 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9780822982777

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

To out your text creates the illusion that queer texts can be written, that an author’s relationship with a text is simply a matter of interplay between two points on a rhetorical triangle. Such a relationship is, however, a multifaceted intersection of shifting bodies, fingers, tongues that speak, not-so-silent emotions, a series of conflicts not to be (re)solved but to be exploded into language.

Jacqueline Rhodes, Homo Origo: The Queertext Manifesto

We understand queer composing as a queer rhetorical practice aimed at disrupting how we understand ourselves to ourselves. As such, it is a composing that is not a composing, a call in many ways to acts of de- and un- and re-composition.

Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander, from Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self

Elementary school—when it was time to get in line to walk from the primary classroom to gym class or to music class. There were, without question, the girls’ line and the boys’ line—the two linear formations in which we were to walk from one room to another. And there was me, always lingering at the end of those lines, floating between them like a small balloon. The narrative begins this way because it continues in this way as I stand now still in this androgynous, passing body, a body that cannot align itself even disciplinarily.

In a 1995 issue of Educational Theory, Deborah Britzman asks the question, Is there a queer pedagogy? She asked this question at a time when scholars in English and in education were beginning to raise questions about what queer studies brings to teaching, about what conversations would emerge if we imagined queerness in relation to teaching and to the teaching of English. We can mark this time period in the mid-1990s as a moment when scholars began to put the terms queer and pedagogy side by side, though we might say at this moment that what this pairing of notions means or what it makes possible is still developing. The mid-1990s also marks the appearance of texts such as George Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman’s Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature (1995), Linda Garber’s Tilting the Tower: Lesbians/Teaching/Queer Subjects (1994), and Harriet Malinowitz’s Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities (1995). Malinowitz’s book marks a moment when English’s queer lens begins to sway toward composition more particularly. Several years later, both College English and JAC published special issues on queer pedagogies and lesbian and gay studies. In 2008, the publication of Jonathan Alexander’s Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies illuminates the ways the merging of these two fields is still providing active and interesting sites for discussions about the teaching of writing.

Composition, thankfully, has often welcomed the illuminations that have come from outside the confines of its own area of study. In Feminism and Methodology in Composition Studies (1992), Patricia Sullivan called for feminism to become a more fully realized voice within composition studies, urging that if our field did not understand issues of gender difference and sexual politics, we [could] never hope to achieve the full understanding of composing that has been the goal of composition studies from its inception (38). Nearly two decades later, in 2009, Jonathan Alexander and David Wallace articulate a call to action about the critical power of queerness, which, they argue, remains an under-explored and under-utilized modality in composition studies (301). They ask questions about what it means to take the queer turn in composition (302). I consider it a pedagogical imperative to invest in what this queer turn could mean—not only for composition’s long-standing commitment to social justice but also for students (and for scholars in the field) as writers.

When I examine the ways queer pedagogies are represented in scholarship about teaching, and in particular about the teaching of composition, I notice some interesting patterns. First, oftentimes (as in Malinowitz’s book or in Garber’s anthology) notions of queer pedagogies seem bound to LGBTQ subjects—queer teachers or queer students. Second, I notice that queer pedagogies are frequently equated with queer texts or the reading of LGBTQ literature. Finally, I notice very few references to student writing as writing, meaning that discussions of student writing are bound to discussions of content (how to respond to homophobic papers or how to teach students to respect and honor differences in their writing, for example). I value and make use of all of these kinds of inquiry in my teaching and in my writing about teaching, and I think the work and patterns I refer to here take up very important questions about reading and writing practices. However, I understand my exploration of queer pedagogies as more explicitly connected to methodologies or approaches to teaching and to writing. In this book and with permission from my students, as collaborators and generators of scholarship, I explore the terrain where queer theory, writing, and pedagogy overlap, intersect, and move into one another. Working through transcripts of class discussions, student writing, teaching notes, and journals, I want to raise questions about the act of writing and the teaching of writing; I want to consider queer possibilities for the teaching of writing with particular attention to college writing courses. I want to continually develop queer methodologies, thinking of queer pedagogies as sets of theorized practices that any student or teacher might engage, sets of theorized practices that as practices were, or could be, queer. I see this work as an extension of what Karen Kopelson describes as a performative or ambiguous pedagogy when she writes, We know, for example, that advocating particular political positions in the classroom becomes much more highly charged and fraught with risks when we are going to be read as occupying somehow ‘corresponding’ identity positions, and thus as advancing political/pedagogical ‘agendas’ based on or arising from those identity positions. The question then, the dilemma, is how to advocate those political positions to which we are committed anyway (Of Ambiguity 564). I think a good part of the solution to the dilemma is not about content, not about teaching about one particular issue over another, but more about the approaches we take to any subject we teach and, more specifically, the approach we take to the teaching of writing. Rather than positioning queerness as connected only to queer texts or queer teachers/students, I offer writing and teaching as already queer practices, and I contend that if we honor the overlaps between queer theory and composition, we encounter complex and evolving possibilities for teaching writing. I argue for and employ what I call queer forms—non-normative and category-resistant forms of writing that move between the critical and the creative, the theoretical and the practical, the rhetorical and the poetic, the queer and the often invisible normative functions of classrooms. I ask myself, What would happen if the teaching of composition were queerer? What would that look like? What kind of writing would students do? What would happen in that queerer classroom? How would I write about that classroom?

In their 2011 article, Queer: An Impossible Subject for Composition, Alexander and Rhodes arrive at the following conclusion: "[We] have now come to believe that queerness is not simply one of composition’s difficult subjects. Queerness is one of composition’s impossible subjects (179). They explain that queerness is essentially about impossibility and excess . . . queerness is the gesture of the unrepresentable, the call for a space of impossibility, the insistence that not everything be composed (180). Here, Alexander and Rhodes contend with the multiple meanings of composure—something perhaps always imbued with normativity. When we compose ourselves, we reduce ourselves to available and understandable forms, we get it together, we clean up our messy identities, our emotions, our grammar, and we produce shapely texts (194). Here, we can begin to think about whether it is possible to compose queerly, to write queer, to teach writing queer. Alexander and Rhodes suggest that it seems more important to see how queerness challenges the very subject of composition, of what it means to compose, of what it means to be composed (182). This book, in its composition and its content, seeks to be de- and un- and re-" composed, to explore the impossible landscape of queer composition, to consider the possibility of teaching queer.

In The Failure of Queer Pedagogy, a video essay from The Writing Instructor’s 2015 special issue entitled Queer and Now, Jacqueline Rhodes reveals,

I struggle with the melding of queer and pedagogy. Can such a thing as queer pedagogy even exist? For pedagogy is about disciplining the subject. Pedagogy is a heterosexed political indoctrination in service of a heterosexed institutional imperative. The queer challenges such disciplining, such assimilation, and resists the demarcation of acceptable and unacceptable, appropriate and inappropriate. There can be and are queer teachers. There can be and is queer teaching, but queer teachers teaching queerly still struggle against the confines of capital P pedagogy, which is informed by a logic of mastery, of individual attainment, and of institutional assessment of that attainment.

Rhodes invites us to recall that the teaching of composition in the university is teaching that happens within the norms of institutional, departmental, and programmatic constraints. And, of course, there is no denying the fact of the institutional imperative. I wonder, though, what locations or positions can or do exist outside these kinds of constraints? Even when I imagine the most radical places I can bring to mind, not one of them is innocent of the charge of disciplining the subject. There is, in the end, no outside of institutional constraints even if and when one imagines oneself as outside an actual institution. For Rhodes, then, there is no queer pedagogy; there is only the possibility of queer teachers teaching queerly or, as I might put it, teaching queer. The question remains, How might teachers of composition, even from our various institutional locations and fields of constraint, mobilize queer as an act of resistance?

Queer Methodologies

To consider questions about queering composition, I needed to consider myself as a writer first. I needed to consider how I would go about representing the materials I gather, the students I teach, and the questions I want to ask. In considering these questions of representation and methodology, I became invested in writing that enacts its central inquiries formally, and I turned to scholars in queer theory to think about methodology. Teaching Queer’s subjects of inquiry and its form are informed by my own understandings of what constitutes queer. Jack Halberstam, in the introduction to Female Masculinity, writes that a queer methodology is [. . .] a scavenger methodology, that uses different methods to collect and produce information (13). Halberstam argues that queer methodology attempts to combine methods that are often cast as being at odds with each other, and it refuses the academic compulsion toward disciplinary coherence (13). I take to heart Halberstam’s call for a scavenger methodology, and in this book I try to push on notions of disciplinary, bodily, pedagogical, writerly, and scholarly coherence. I do not think scholarship in teaching can pretend to separate itself from the teachers and students who are its subjects; I cannot convince myself (and have no wish to convince readers) that there is some objective distance between the stories of the lives of teachers and the narratives of their teaching. And because I believe, as Halberstam does, that methods that are often cast as being at odds with each other can be put in dynamic, productive combination, I try to compose as this scavenger. I collect my work and my students’ work alongside one another; I try to move toward the layers of understanding that might emerge. I blur the lines of authorship. I make use of literature, science, personal narrative, and individual experience. I recall my own education; I describe the fragments and fissures of my own life alongside ruminations on the loon, my martial arts practice, the body, dolphins, comets, and my third-grade teacher—all become narrative threads with and against which my students and I can be read and interpreted. In this sense, this project is about writing, and this project is writing. Teaching writing queer and writing queer. Or, at least, as queer as it is possible to teach and write.

In Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham’s gathering of writers’ voices in Critical Intellectuals on Writing, Judith Butler responds to a question about her statement that difficult language can change a tough world. Butler writes, I believe it is important that intellectuals with a sense of social responsibility be able to shift registers and to work at various levels, to communicate what they’re communicating in various ways (Olson and Worsham 45). In many ways, this book communicates in various ways, in several registers, and in multiplying forms. Because I believe, as Vershawn Ashanti Young puts it, [r]eally, theoretical discussion cannot be put to better use—I think—than for someone to wrap his life in it and disclose just how closely or loosely the cover fits, just how much warmth the blanket provides or how much cold it still lets in (13).

Instead of a science project, I wrote what I called a science book entitled The Monarch, and I remember drawing pictures of my family, giving them butterflies as faces. Alongside my father and mother, my siblings and their butterfly heads, I composed narratives that made use of all the science projects I could see in the room. I remember writing down the names of planets, which I used as the names for the characters with the butterfly heads, who were also my family. I remember there were volcanoes, and I remember trying to describe the anatomy of a fly—something Joey Lavarco, who had to repeat third grade twice and whom I loved for his irreverence, was working on in the back row. This is the first time I remember writing queerly and having a teacher who celebrated that sensibility in me.

Johnnie Hart, a student in one of the first-year writing courses I examine in this project, writes in his midterm course evaluation form,

It’s like I keep going to write something down, but I feel lost. I feel like there is not much I can say for sure in this class. So I guess my biggest question is how do I write if I can’t say anything for sure about anything? In high school I was supposed to pretend to be sure when I wasn’t in my writing and lots of other things come to think of it, but now, now being sure is a sign of weakness when before it was a sign of strength. My thinking feels all watery. It’s hard to fight the urge to freeze it back up.

It is easy to note Johnnie Hart’s narrative gift of metaphor—how he is able to imagine his way through the literal circumstances of his experience with the readings and with the course. I am interested in his sense of liquid, of his thinking being watery. I am interested in that water as a kind of alternative epistemology, a way of thinking and writing. I am curious about how I might more explicitly encourage student work that functions as liquid, as fluid. For me, this means I must contend with fluidity in terms of reading, writing, thinking, and interpretation, as all of these kinds of literacy practices overlap and move into another when students engage the practice of writing, or when anyone does.

One of the things I notice, again and again, about the work of queer theorists (and really, the work of many writers I love) is the fierceness with which they are willing to interrogate the self, identity, and language. We need not reach very far into the pockets of queer studies to find this interrogation: Foucault’s interrogation of discourse and the repressive hypothesis in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, Butler’s interrogation of the category of woman in Gender Trouble, or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s interrogation of coming out in Epistemology of the Closet. Sedgwick writes, But, again, the extent, construction and meaning, and especially the history of any such theoretical continuity—not to mention its consequences for practical politics—must be open to every interrogation (88). In fact, even to think of Butler’s move to imagine drag as a kind of potentially subversive trying on of gender is also a way to imagine the courses I teach as a potentially subversive trying on of queer teaching—a kind of inductive experiment. Queer pedagogy is not liberatory pedagogy, not critical or feminist pedagogy, but something else. And as Sedgwick additionally asserts, [a]ntihomophobic inquiry is not co-extensive with feminist inquiry, but we can’t know in advance how they will be different (83). The same holds true for queer pedagogical inquiry and other types of pedagogical inquiry. I teach writing courses with interrogation in mind—interrogation that would inevitably involve interrogations of language, identity, and self. I try to begin my courses with an interrogation into perhaps one of the most sacred culminations of language, identity, and self: gender. After all, male/female functions as a primary and perhaps model binarism affecting the structure and meaning of many, many other binarisms (Sedgwick, Epistemology 84). I have the idea that if students do work in thinking through this powerful system of meaning, it would not only help them to understand how selves are made and how systems of domination operate, but it would also help them to write more interesting and more complicated work, writing that proceeds without the assumption that meaning can be contained. Just as Sedgwick characterizes her project as a writer, I, too, would characterize my project as a teacher of writing: "[r]epeatedly to ask how certain categorizations work, what enactments they are performing and what relations they are creating, rather than what they essentially mean, has been my principal strategy" (Sedgwick, Epistemology 83). How categorizations work is a question of theoretical function and construction as opposed to what categorizations mean, which would suggest first that we could even know what they mean and second that they have inherent or fixed meaning. While queer pedagogy would not be the first radical pedagogy to aim to disrupt binarisms, it does seem that a queer pedagogy might ask that students and teachers disrupt binaries in some very specific, embodied, sexed, and gendered ways—ways that cut right to the heart of who we think we are, or who we think others are. These categorizations, of course, have something to do with gender and bodies (kinds of people), but they also have everything to do with form (kinds of writing).

It seems to have started quite early—the idea that some things that I found so strange and terrifying were, to others, quite obvious and comforting. There was, however, some consensus, like the idea that I should accept the invitation to join the third-grade Gifted and Talented Reading Group at Forest Brook Elementary School. I don’t remember any of the books we read in that group except one. It was a book titled Call It Courage, by Armstrong Sperry, and it was about a young boy whose mother was killed by the sea in a hurricane; of course, the young boy, Mafatu, was terrified of the sea and felt cast out by his community, which valued courage above all things. As narrative would have it, Mafatu goes out to sea alone to face his fears. Mrs. Sullivan, the beautiful librarian who painted on her eyebrows and drove a gleaming red car, chose me for the reading group. I had been a library aide for two years, and I suspect while my grades weren’t always strong, she chose me because of the sheer number of books she had watched me check out. To this day, I am not exactly certain if I read any of them. But Call It Courage I did read. I read it on the school bus, on the way to Little League practice, late at night when just enough hall light (which I insisted be left on) shone through the bedroom door. I was obsessed with Mafatu’s fear, and with the idea that there seemed to be no one else in his entire community who feared the sea. I had a hard time believing this, and when I told Mrs. Sullivan that there was no way no other kid was afraid of the sea except Mafatu, she said that even though we lived on Long Island we had no concept of how close Mafatu lived to the sea. And living so close, she explained, the sea was just part of everyone’s life, so it is believable that no one living that close to the sea and looking out to the sea each day would be afraid of it in the way that Mafatu was.

The Question of Narrative

I had asked my students to read a chapter from Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender. Danielle says Butler is impossible. Maria jokes, Doesn’t she have anything better to do than be completely impenetrable? Johnnie says, This woman does talk in circles, I’ll give ’em that. I fear this is the start of the coup—the moment when my students forge an ever-strengthening uprising to overthrow the queer text they have been given. And by extension they seem to threaten to overthrow me, their queer teacher, and also to leave little room for the possibility of value in queer and difficult texts. I feel simultaneously angry and guilty. But I need to hurry, to decide what approach to take. There is, of course, the eat your vegetables, they are good for you approach, which I have to say usually ends with my students rightfully feeding my metaphorical vegetables to the metaphorical dog. There is the therapeutic approach; this is when I say, Are you frustrated by this text? and perhaps I make the ever-predictable move of take us to a place in the chapter you found so difficult or frustrating to understand. There is also the I hate ‘the man’ too approach, in which I validate their revolution. I say things like, Yes, Judith Butler is impossible. I say, Yeah, I don’t know why this theory stuff has to be so dense on purpose. I say, We want theory for the people!

I can’t say that I like the teacher (me) in this narrative very much. I can’t say I find the students that compelling either—how could they be compelling when they are so erased by my own inner neuroses? What my students are saying to me is quite interesting, though because I categorize their response to Butler as resistance or, even more problematically, as a coup, it can be difficult to see how their responses are interesting. However, I suppose my anxiety, which is what causes me to see their responses as a kind of coup, does interest me. The anxiety speaks to some of the complicated questions of power present in all classroom scenarios. And as queer theory’s interventions in pedagogy can tell us, power is not fixed; it is ever shifting, even in moments when we are reaching for its fixity. Knowing this, I need to find ways to work with the moments I can feel the power shifting between myself and my students, who can also feel power shift. My internal monologue both amuses and disturbs me at once because if a shift in power is happening in this moment, none of the approaches I consider above seems to be conscious of that power shift. Each move is an attempt at taking power back, or asserting its fixity, rather than moving with the shift of power in the direction of my students. So, perhaps I can tell the same story another way.

When my students say Judith Butler is impenetrable, I laugh. I say, Don’t you think it’s kinda ironic that we’re calling a butch lesbian queer theorist ‘impenetrable’? They look stumped. Finally, Johnnie says enthusiastically from the back, Oh, I get it. Impenetrable, like won’t be penetrated. Like by a man. The students shift uncomfortably in their seats. Something like that, I say. I’m a little worried I’ve said something wrong but hope I’m hiding it well. I hope I am teaching my students that penetration is a something we can collectively consider as an intellectual term. When my students then say Butler is impossible, I feel sad, defensive even. So I read from Butler page 29: Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread. Interesting, I say, that we are accusing a person who says possibility is as crucial as bread of being impossible. Does anyone else find this interesting? From the back again: It just proves her point, Johnnie says. I am sweating. I know in my mind that I have my clothes on, but my body feels naked. And Johnnie, the other visible queer in the classroom, is wearing his compassion on his sleeve. I can tell he wants to help me. We are of the same impossible body, after all. Him with his purple beret, skinny-girl jeans, and beautiful queer lisp. Me with my unruly chin hair and a voice that I can only describe as my father’s. How will Johnnie and I lead the students out of impossibility? This woman does talk in circles, Johnnie says, I’ll give ’em that.

I don’t know about this teacher either. And clearly the representation of students is just as problematic as their erasure. I